When I sat down to eat breakfast, I saw a tiny box with a bow on it.
“It’s for good luck,” my mom said.
This worried me a little bit, because it was like my mom already knew that things were going to be rocky for me at North Teton Middle School and that I would need luck. I lifted the top off and stared down at a pink bracelet. It was really spectacular. Too bad I couldn’t show it to Sylvie.
“Thanks,” I said. I slid the pink beads over my hand and settled the bracelet on my wrist. Then I looked at the clock to make sure I wouldn’t miss the bus.
“Don’t worry,” my mom said. “You’ve got plenty of time.”
I finished eating and put on my backpack. With all of my supplies in it, that thing was so heavy it made me tip a little. Then I realized that I should not have practiced wearing it empty in front of my mirror; I should have practiced wearing it stuffed with heavy items. Because from what I knew thus far in my life about teachers and homework, my backpack would only get heavier by the end of the day.
“You’re not taking your phone, right?” my mom asked.
“I am,” I said.
My mother frowned. “What if you drop it? You’re not even allowed to use it at school.”
I glanced at my phone. Why did my mom think I would drop it? That was a rude thing to think. Then, while I was looking at it, something cool happened. It started to ring.
“Who is it?” my mom asked. But the way she asked the question made it sound like she already knew.
I read the number. “It’s Grandma!”
“How exciting!” my mother said.
And it was exciting. I hadn’t talked to her since she’d fled my life to be with Willy.
Me: Grandma! Where are you?
Grandma: We made it through Nebraska. We should be in Minnesota tomorrow.
Me: That’s a bummer.
Grandma: It’s not a bummer. Willy and I are having a great time!
Me: Oh. (pause) I miss you.
Grandma: I miss you, too, doll. And I want you to have a great day at school. I bet you’ll make a thousand friends.
Me: That’s unlikely, because my school doesn’t even have a thousand people in it.
Grandma: I was speaking hyperbolically.
Me: Hyper what?
Grandma: Maybe you should look it up in your pocket dictionary.
Me: Okay.
So I slipped off my backpack and unzipped it and pulled out my pink pocket dictionary.
Me: My dictionary doesn’t have that word. How do you spell it?
Mom: Is Grandma playing a spelling game with you? I don’t think you have time for that.
Me: But I need to know what hyperbolically means or I’ll be distracted all day.
Grandma: Look up hyperbole. H-Y-P-E-R-B-O-L-E.
Me: A deliberate exaggeration used for effect. Well, I knew you were exaggerating, I just didn’t know what hyperbolically meant.
Grandma: Now you do.
Me: When do you enter your first cave?
Mom: You don’t have time for a conversation. This was supposed to be a pep talk.
Me: Excuse me, Mom, but Grandma is still pepping me.
Grandma: It sounds like you have to go, Bessica.
But I was having a pretty good conversation, and I wasn’t totally ready to leave my house and get on a school bus and go to middle school and face all those hazards. I probably would have felt differently if Sylvie was on my bus. But that wasn’t going to be my reality.
Then my mom took away the phone.
Mom: She’s going to miss the bus. Can she call you after school?
Then my mother looked at me. “Put on your backpack. You might need to run.”
I put on my backpack, but I didn’t think I wanted to run. Because everybody on my bus would see me doing that. And I hadn’t practiced running in my backpack; I’d only practiced standing in front of my mirror. What if I looked stupid?
“Are you still talking to Grandma?” I asked, pointing to my phone.
My mom snapped my phone closed. “She’ll call you later.”
Instead of handing me my phone, she set it on the mail-sorting table by the front door. Then I felt my mom pushing on my shoulder. “The bus!”
“Don’t shove me,” I said. “I’m top-heavy. I’ll tip.”
“But you don’t want to miss it!” my mom said.
I didn’t know whether that was a true statement. My mom gave me another push and I guess her panic was contagious, because I hurried out the door and took off running like a crazy person. But I didn’t run very far. Because it was too late. The bus had already passed my house.
My mom walked outside and stood beneath our porch light and stared at me.
“I just missed the bus,” I said.
“Let me tell Dad that I’m driving you.”
So on the first day, my mom drove me to school. But as she cruised down the road, I became very worried about something. Would my mother driving me to school make me look like a baby? Or a wimp? Or a dweeb? Or some sort of baby-wimp-dweeb combo? I didn’t want that.
“Do you want me to drop you near the T?” she asked.
It was like my mom and I weren’t even on the same team anymore. Why would I want that? “No!” I yelled.
My mother glanced over at me with a very confused expression.
My stomach flipped over and over. I still felt two ways about school. I wanted to go to school worse than anything. And worse than anything, I didn’t want to go to school. I sort of wanted my mom to keep driving. Maybe all the way to Canada. Then it happened! I could see the school. And I didn’t want to see the school. Then I could see the kids outside the school. Then I could see the T!
I began to breathe very fast as my mother passed a school bus. It looked crowded. I could see people laughing behind the rectangle windows. This was not good. I’d really blown it. Because the bus ride might have been an excellent friendship-building opportunity, whereas having your mother drop you off near the T could get you killed.
“You can let me out here,” I said.
But my mom was still driving thirty miles per hour.
“Don’t take me to the T,” I begged.
“Okay. I’ll pull into the drive,” she said.
But when I looked at the drive, it was lined with buses. And there was a Bus Only sign at the top of the drive.
“It’s Bus Only!” I said. “Don’t park here!” I didn’t want my mom parking in the wrong place so everybody would stare at me when I got out of the car.
But my mother stopped the car.
“I’m sure they don’t mind,” she said. “It’s your first day.”
I felt my mom leaning toward me. I looked at her and saw a pair of puckered lips closing in on me. “Mom!” I said. “You can’t kiss me in front of the whole school.” I pointed out my window at the school.
“Okay. Bye.” She pulled back and waved.
“Bye,” I said. Then I swallowed hard and hurried out of the car. I hustled across the lawn in the darkness; my backpack really slowed me down. For the next year, until the new school was built, day classes would start at six-thirty in the morning. I didn’t know how I was going to survive. Sylvie’s classes didn’t start until one o’clock in the afternoon. But she didn’t get out of school until it was almost night. I was halfway to the building when I heard something I didn’t want to hear.
“Look at that sixth grader run!” a boy yelled.
And I realized he might have been talking about me, so I slowed down. But he said something else.
“Now she doesn’t want to run anymore,” the boy said. “Too bad. She was funny to watch.”
And then I heard people laughing and it cut through me. I didn’t want people laughing at me. That was not why I’d come to middle school. And that was when it hit me! I was being teased. I had seen on a talk show once that if you didn’t stand up to the person who was teasing you right away, you would be teased until you moved away. And both my parents li
ked their jobs and we didn’t have any plans to move. So I needed to stand up for myself. I turned toward the teaser and acted like I wasn’t afraid. Even though I was.
“Sometimes I run. Sometimes I walk,” I said. “It’s a free country.”
And then he did this awful thing where he walked toward me and he said in a fake girl voice, “Sometimes I run and sometimes I walk. It’s a free country.” Then he made a growling noise for no reason at all.
I wanted him to stop. Because I hadn’t come to middle school to get growled at either. I’d come to middle school to take six classes and possibly become a cheerleader and chorus member and join other exciting groups and make a bunch of friends.
But the teaser kept growling at me. And then I realized I wasn’t standing where most of the other kids were standing. Somehow I’d drifted and I wasn’t anywhere near the front door of the school. I was off to the side. I’d been lured to the T! I looked around in horror. That was when I saw the red marks on the ground. They could have been paint, but to me they looked like dried puddles of blood. I felt very afraid. I breathed so quickly that I thought I was going to suck in too much air and make my lungs pop like balloons.
The boy walked closer to me.
And instead of walking away or saying something more to stand up for myself, I yelled, “It’s the T!”
Apparently, school staff were aware of the T’s reputation, because a teacher named Mrs. Hackett appeared out of nowhere. And she started yelling at the teaser and his two friends.
“Who’s causing problems?” Mrs. Hackett asked. Then she glared at them. And then she looked at me.
Then I figured that growling was basically the same thing as causing problems, so I pointed at the boy who’d done that.
She put her hand on my shoulder and it looked a lot like a man’s hand. It had hair on it and everything. And then I noticed that Mrs. Hackett had goggles dangling around her neck. Also, she smelled like diesel fuel. I looked up at her and then back at the jerk-boys. I kept pointing at the growler—a tall, thin blond kid who was wearing baggy jeans.
“We were just talking!” the boy said.
“All right, Cola, remember what you were told last year after the pushpin/water balloon fiasco. Any subsequent disruption—even the tiniest infraction—would result in a visit to the principal’s office. You know the way,” Mrs. Hackett said.
I couldn’t believe it. I gasped and covered my mouth with my hand. I hadn’t even made it inside the building yet and I’d encountered a psycho-bully. I glanced at the other two boys. Then it hit me. These must be the other two psycho-bullies! My knees felt very shaky, and the other two psycho-bullies shot me very hateful looks. It made me feel terrible. In fact, I felt terrible about my whole morning.
By the time Cola the psycho-bully got hauled away, there weren’t many people outside anymore. And I became very worried that I was going to be tardy for nutrition. So I hurried as fast as I could into the building. That was when I saw all the club posters. They hadn’t been there at orientation. The papers were taped to the walls. Green posters. Orange posters. Blue posters. Yellow posters. Pink posters.
There were so many clubs. There was one for chorus. And cheerleading. And a book club. I pulled off the posters I found interesting as fast as I could, because they contained all the information about where and when the clubs met. And that was useful information that was hard to remember. Even though it seemed like a long shot, I even took a poster about a math club.
“Hey!” said a girl. “Those are nonremovable.”
She was so tall that I knew right away that she was a seventh or possibly eighth grader. But what she was saying didn’t make much sense, because I’d found the posters very removable. They were only held up with tape.
She stood there with her straight-across bangs and long brown hair, waiting for me to say something. But I didn’t. “They are posted with the School Approved stamp,” the girl explained. “You’re not allowed to take down official signs.”
I looked at the pile of posters. “Official signs?” They didn’t look all that official. They looked like I could make them at home on my computer.
“You need to put them back up,” the girl said.
“But I don’t have any tape,” I told her. “And I’ll be late for class.”
She held her hand out like she wanted me to give her the posters. She seemed so bossy and unkind about it. I wondered if maybe she was a psycho-bully too.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
But I didn’t answer her, because in this situation I preferred to remain anonymous.
“My name is Cameron Bon Qui Qui. I’m a hall monitor. When I ask questions you have to answer them. I have that kind of authority.”
And so I handed her the posters, even though I needed that information. Then I turned around and started hustling toward my locker.
“Hey,” Cameron Bon Qui Qui said. “I need to know your name. Plus, you can’t run in the hallways. Slow down or I’ll report you.”
I slowed down a little, but not because I wanted to slow down. There were so many bodies in the hallway that it was tough to get around them all. Also, a lot of them seemed lost. I kept moving, winding around their bulging backpacks. I heard Cameron Bon Qui Qui’s footsteps behind me. I wanted her to leave me alone and let me find my locker.
“Stop!” Cameron Bon Qui Qui said. “When a hall monitor says ‘stop’ you have to stop. It’s in our middle-school constitution!”
I was surprised to hear that my middle school had one of those, or that I would be expected to honor it without even knowing what it said. So then I started running again, and I didn’t even try to open my stupid locker. In fact, I didn’t even remember where my stupid locker was. I hurried up the stairs and ducked into room 204, which was where I was supposed to be for my first class, nutrition. I found a seat in the corner and I put my head down on my desk.
I heard Cameron Bon Qui Qui’s shoes squeak past room 204.
“I’m looking for a violator,” she said. “She has short brown hair.”
Then a bell rang.
“Just go to class,” a voice in the hallway said. It sounded like a grown-up, but I couldn’t see her. “Lots of people are violators on the first day.” It was a woman wearing a red fluffy sweater and red cowboy boots. She looked like a cowgirl. She had a shiny belt buckle, but it wasn’t nearly as big as Willy’s. Then she walked into the room and shut the door.
I lifted up my head and looked around. So this was nutrition. I thought maybe we’d study apples or good posture. But I really had no idea. I glanced around the room. All the nice kids seemed to be sitting at the front. And here I was, sitting next to kids who looked like they vandalized the vending machines on a regular basis. As soon as I had a chance to move seats, I was going to take it.
“I am Mrs. Mounds,” the teacher said. She wrote her name on the dry-erase board in big pink letters. “Look around. Where you are seated today will be your permanent seat.”
I looked around and then I almost puked. I couldn’t believe what I saw. One of the psycho-bullies from the T incident was in my class and he was sitting right next to me. He scowled at me and I looked back up to the front of the room. If I were sitting in the middle of the class, I’d be closer to more people and have a better chance of making friends. This was lame. I smiled at a tough-looking girl who was wearing a football jersey over her shirt. She didn’t smile back. She looked at me like she’d already decided that she didn’t want to like me. And I had no idea why that was.
“As many of you may know, this is your homeroom,” Mrs. Mounds said.
I had never had a homeroom before.
“This class is ten minutes longer than your other classes,” Mrs. Mounds said.
I pulled out my schedule and checked this out. She was right.
“It’s a time for official school announcements, which is how each day will start.”
Then a voice boomed into our room from a speaker on the wall.
Then Principal Tidge repeated a lot of information that I already knew. She even repeated the banned-weapons list, which was a downer to hear first thing in the morning. I was pretty happy when she got to the end.
“I want you to have a great day! And remember to be kind to the sixth graders! See you in the hallways!”
From across the hallway I could hear people laughing. Then I heard a boy yell, “I’m gonna smash a sixth grader just like this!” Then I heard a terrible thumping sound, and the laughter got really loud. But nobody in our room laughed. Because we were all sixth graders.
I watched Mrs. Mounds write her email address on the board, next to a list of rules. She had a lot of rules. We couldn’t be late. Or eat or drink. Or use any electronic equipment. We couldn’t talk. And we had to sit in the same desk each time. And we got a zero on all late work. And if we cheated on anything we’d fail. Also, she had a rule that we couldn’t pass gas, which I guess made sense. I’d just never seen it as a written rule before. Some kids laughed when she read that one.
“She means we can’t fart,” the psycho-bully said to another kid.
“She must have big-time farting problems,” the kid said. Then he made a very quiet farting noise and he and the psycho-bully snickered.
“Listen up,” Mrs. Mounds said. “No talking while I’m talking.”
After everybody was quiet again, Mrs. Mounds handed us information cards to fill out and I unzipped my backpack to get a pen. When Mrs. Mounds heard my zipper, she looked at me.
“Backpacks have to be stored in your locker,” she said. “In the hallways they’re bumping hazards. In the classroom they’re tripping hazards.”
“I know,” I said. I looked down at my backpack. It was halfway in the aisle and I felt bad about that. I thought maybe she was going to force me to leave class and put my hazardous backpack in my locker. But she didn’t.
“Make sure you put it in your locker before the next class,” she said.
The Reinvention of Bessica Lefter Page 7